Nothing But Brush Strokes

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta, and
the co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views
of Canada, 1880–1914.

A writer on writers? Or the writer as critic? I think the first is the
better; less daunting, promising something personal and more intimate.
And this is mainly what we get from Phyllis Webb, even when she writes
about Marcel Proust and T.S. Eliot in articles with such seemingly
academic (I almost said pretentious) titles as “Waterlily and
Multifoliate Rose: Cyclic Notions in Proust” and “Poetry and
Psychobiography.” For even though the editors have titled this series
The Writer as Critic, we must (happily) expect not heavy exegesis but
rather stimulating insights.

Webb takes us into the presence of such writers, as well as into her
presence when she confronts them. Of T.S. Eliot she writes: “As I try
to slip away from his luminous presence, his concentrated reality, I’m
swept off my feet again and dropped down into gloomy old, foggy old
London town. An underground office in Lloyd’s Bank. A tall, lean
figure paces up and down chanting Shantih, shantih, shantih. Strangely
familiar, but what does it all mean? Of course, it’s Mr. Eliot writing
poetry on company time: The Wasteland, 1921. He senses my presence,
twirls around. ‘You!’ he accuses, ‘You!’ fixing me with his
baleful eyes. If you ask me, he looks like a man on the verge of a
nervous breakdown. ‘You—nattering on about Vivian’s bedding Bertie
Russell and Ottoline’s silly gossip!’ And then he points, and not
like André; this time the finger points at me! He intones in that
sepulchral voice: ‘Your shadow at morning striding before you / Or
your shadow at evening rising to meet you: / I will show you fear in a
handful of dust.” This is just a taste of Phyllis Webb. Is it not
delicious and so, so satisfying? I think it is. And if it is true that
Webb once said, “My only access to truth is my poetry,” she must now
recant and say that

truth has many voices—this one as compelling as any other.